For the first time, the Society has offered a $10,000 scholarship, and it has gone to an international student, Verónica Mailhes, of the Universidad de La Plata, Argentina. Verónica studies with Professor Angelita Martínez, who did her doctoral work with Erica García. (Angelita leads a contingent of faculty and graduate students pursuing Columbia School work in Argentina, and was the host of a recent Columbia School Institute at the Universidad de La Plata.)

Verónica Mailhes(Universidad de La Plata, Argentina)

​My proposal aims to investigate, following the principles of Columbia School Linguistics, the variable use of so-called future tenses in Spanish, conventionally known in the grammars as the morphological future (FM) and the periphrastic future (FP). In a project of wide scope, we start by limiting our data to political discourse in River Plate Spanish. The project offers first a critique of the meanings that have been traditionally attributed to these forms: higher vs. lower degree of facticity of the event. In this proposal, it is postulated that objective facticity is not the relevant semantic substance. Rather, we explore the possibility that the relevant substance is control by the speaker over the event. When politicians want to express control over the event, they opt for the PF form, opting for the MF form where less control is involved. Take note of the semantic substance involved. Under this hypothesis, the term 'control' refers to control by the speaker, not control by a participant or controller in the event named by the verb, as in existing analyses of Spanish clitics, Latin case endings, and English word order.​